Category: Kev’s Blog

Posted on

mdm crashing after upgrade from Mint 17.3 to Mint 18 (and solution)

I recently upgraded my Mint 17.3 to Mint 18 using mintupgrade and following the instructions here, and unluckily had a powercut while in the middle of the upgrade. When I rebooted, some things had changed, like the logon screen had new background images, and the grub menu now said ‘Mint 18’, but as soon as I logged on, mdm crashed and there was a dialog saying that XWindows had crashed within seconds of starting. The popup dialog said to check ~/.xsession-errors, which contained this error:

initctl: Unable to connect to Upstart: Failed to connect to socket /com/ubuntu/upstart: Connection refused
syndaemon: no process found

A quick Google found this question with the same error message, and following the suggestion to run ‘sudo apt-get install cinnamon’ fixed my issues. I restarted mdm with ‘sudo service mdm restart’, logged on and eveything was good.

I’m not entirely sure how much of the upgrade completed, so re-running ‘mintupgrade upgrade’ again still prompted for a number of packages to be deleted or upgraded. Completed the upgrade, rebooted, and now everything looks good.

This could have been a lot worse, but luckily was able to recover with no noticeable issues so far. And Mint 18 looks great! (I like the new window animations!)

Posted on

Docker Swarm node set up with Docker 1.12 RC on Raspberry Pi

I’ve been following through the steps in this article to set up a Docker swarm cluster on a pair of Raspberry Pis. Most of the steps work as-is from Mac OS, but for a few steps there’s a couple of variations.

This is most likely going to be part 1 of a few posts as I work through and get this working.

For example, to copy your ssh key to the Pis, instead of:

ssh-copy-id pirate@pi3.local

… you can do (from tip here):

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh user@machine "mkdir ~/.ssh; cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys"

To switch between remote hosts:

eval $(docker-machine env pi1)

where pi1 is the name of the remote host.

To switch back to the localhost (not entirely obvious but found the answer here):

eval "$(docker-machine env -u)"

After ‘swarm init’ and adding the other nodes to the cluster, ‘docker swarm ls’ lists the nodes in the cluster:

More to come in part 2:-)

Posted on

Installing kernel headers for Oracle Linux 6 on VirtualBox

The usual reason for Guest Additions failing to install on a Linux guest on Virtual Box is that the kernel headers are missing. How you install these or where they come from varies from distro to distro, although they’re usually available via the package manager on that distro.

I had an Oracle Linux 6 guest installed, Guest Additions (for video drivers, shared folder, clipboard sharing) was all working, and then at some point I started it up again and it was no longer working and wouldn’t re-install either. Seems like I’d picked up an update, and I needed to update the kernel headers too.

This post covers the steps needed. On OE6 before installing the Guest Additions, just run ‘yum install kernel-uek-devel’ and you should be good to go (assuming you’re booting with the ‘unbreakable kernel’ and not the RHEL compatible kernel)

Posted on

Configuring a static IP on HypriotOS for the Raspberry Pi

How you configure a static IP on the Pi changed between Wheezy and Jessie, and it seems on Hypriot’s prebuilt images for running Docker on the Pi, it’s a slight variation.

Edit /etc/network/interfaces.d/eth0, comment out the DHCP line:

iface eth0 inet dhcp

and add:

iface eth0 inet static
address your-static-ip
gateway your-gateway-ip
#google dns servers
domain_name_servers=8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4

Done!

Proudly powered by WordPress